But first: Random thoughts on a No Packers Sunday, the first day of frost, Fall 2017. Not sure I’d watch if there was a game. Not because of kneeling but because of no Aaron Rodgers.

Quotes of the Week

“All I had to do was catch it and run forward.” — 300-pound Badger offensive left tackle Michael Deiter in the WI State Journal 10-29-17. (Simple plans are the best.)

“Seriously! Block his ass!” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist and heckler’s veto champion Emily Mills on Facebook in lame response to Your Humble Squire. (Irony is lost on liberals who make their living off the First Amendment.)

“I savor sentences and can almost taste them in my mouth. I’m still a print dinosaur and like the tactile sensation of turning over pages.” — Ron Chernow, biographer of Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and U.S. Grant in the N.Y. Times Book Review 10-29-17. (My sentiments, exactly. Tasty, too!)

Most consequential development: The Saudi crown prince announces a More Moderate Islam. Mecca and Medina are the two holiest places of Islam. His caliphate has promoted Wahhabism. The long-term solution to ISIS.

Have They No Shame? “For days, Icelanders gathered outside Parliament and hurled fish and yogurt in protest.” — New York Times page A-12, 10-29-17. (Fruit on the bottom?)

There, I fixed it: “Sign of Trouble in Indonesia Dane County Courts: Rulings that Defy Facts.” — headline, New York Times page A-12, 10-29-17. (How many times can it be overturned on appeal?)

All we are saying is give peace a chance: “Vigilant Rwanda is Winning the War on Plastic Bags.” — New York Times headline, page A6, 10-29-17. (Drugs, child prostitution, elephant poaching, disease, poverty, political terror, genocide? Not so much.)

There, I fixed it: Let the word go forth, in this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the Squire of the Stately Manor wishes to be known to posterity as “Blaska the Resourceful.” (Beats Ethelred the Unready.) Electronic-only trunk hatch on the Policy Werkes fleet car did not open. Repairs quoted at $700, parts and labor. Attached a length of rope to the day-glo kids’ emergency handle inside the trunk, draped said rope outside the trunk around license plate outside and Voy-la!

Meanwhile, on the Southwest side of Madison

My man, Tutankhamun “Coach” Assad, founder of the Mellowhood Foundation, calls out Madison’s liberal-progressive-socialist hegemony for inviting “a cluster of non-profit housing providers.”

A cluster! The power structure here on the Southwest side of Madison — that being Ald. Matt Phair, former Meadowood neighborhood boss Lisa Veldran (and supernumerary to the Madison Common Council) and her house husband County Supv. Matt Veldran— have actively encouraged and abetted all kinds of distressed housing, More Free Stuff, white guilt, and excuse-making. The Capital Times commits good journalism

Assad said members of Meadowood Neighborhood Association are mostly white and they don’t live in the areas of Meadowood dominated by rental properties.

“It’s easy to care about me if you don’t have to live by me,” he said. “It’s easy to say you have an inkling of how my life is led … when you only have to spend an hour a week at a community supper.”

Madison Police Department records show that in the last year (Oct. 26, 2016 to Oct. 15, 2017) officers were dispatched or assigned 81 times to the two Road Home transitional housing properties at 5812 and 5806 Balsam Rd.

The reality for people living in the apartments on Balsam Road is quite different, Assad argued. At 5 p.m., the case managers go home. Under “the cover of night,” Assad said, a different dynamic takes over. It creates an environment where “opportunistic men” prey upon residents of the nonprofit apartment buildings, leading to gun sales, drug sales and violence, Assad said. 

… “You can’t continue to ask a struggling neighborhood with decent citizens who want to maintain the safety and dignity of their neighborhood … to carry the burden and bear the load,” he said.

But that is what Phair, Veldran & Veldran have done these past dozen years. With the connivance of Mo Cheeks and his allies on the Madison Common Council.